The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In a data center with large amount of storage space, a backplane may be used to mount a number of storage drives in an enclosure. To management the operation of the backplane system, a backplane (BP) controller or an enclosure management (EM) controller may be provided. Generally, in a BP controller or an EM controller, LEDs are used to display the drive activity and status, and the LEDs are driven individually. In other words, to drive an LED corresponding to a hard disk drive (HDD) or a solid state drive (SSD) in an enclosure or a backplane, a single dedicated output port from the BP/EM controller is required. However, the number of output ports of the BP/EM controller will be limited, which further limits the number of LEDs displaying the drive activity and status when the number of drives being controller in the enclosure increases.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.